Nescire aude.

June 16, 2005

You can learn a lot on the internet

For instance, there was a post on metafilter today about odd confluences of jargon. You know that Far Side strip about the collision of herpetology and boating, in which the panel is divided into two, diagonally, and each sub-panel has a dude saying something like "she's a beaut, Norm. What is she, a 24-footer?"? Well, it was like that, except in real life.

One of the most interesting, because it had to do with the same phenomenon observed from two different perspectives which nevertheless came up with the same term to describe the relevant aspect for that perspective concerned inbreeding. Y'see, in the first place, it makes the family tree, if it's carried out along multiple generations, a mess of crisscrossing lines, such that you can practically turn it sideways and read it as legibly as when it's rightside up (and that can even help you get a perspective on relations that would otherwise be obscured). It also makes it harder for geneticists to track emergence of traits and ancestry using DNA, because of the limited pool of contributors. (I didn't understand that part as well, I have to confess, and metafilter's timing out for me AOTW.) Here's the thing: both genealogists and geneticists refer to what's produced—the tree in the former and the DNA record in the latter case—as a "palimpcest". Neat, huh?

I've thought more about this, and the problem (insofar as so many people not getting your "joke" is a problem) is that "palimpsest" and "palimpcest" sound exactly alike so there's no "squaw that broke the camel's back"-like cue; moreover, "-cest" isn't very strongly or uniquely associated with "incest" in same way that, for example, anything ending with the sound "rbate" makes one think of "masturbate."

I think the primary difficulty is that palimpsest is just too distracting a word for the context. It raises a "big word!" flag that obscures its possible punnic applications. You might have more success incorporating impcest into a joke about little devils, or something.